If an app is free, it means the customer is paying with his or her data. But it's estimated that only 2% of the data out there is actionable and insightful. Mining and creating value from data are now paramount to business models. Everything can be measured, but what are the most important things to measure? Let's find out.

News Item

Beginning Friday, Jan. 13, the iPad app for The Guardian will require a £9.99 ($15.45 USD) monthly subscription in order for news readers to access content, according to paidContent. New users will be given a 7-day free trial before facing the subscription requirement.

Atex released a new browser-based content management system. The Atex Content system is designed to help media companies manage their workflow and is available for any device with a web browser and the Atex plug-in installed.

Progressive Publishing Alternatives (PPA), part of The Magnus Group, Inc., launched its new website and included more resources and educational tools about editorial services for publishing. These tools can be referenced to help establish editorial and production strategies.

At this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Google plans to unveil new Google TV devices and television sets. Google is expected to ship the majority of its TV sets by mid-2012, according to chairman Eric Schmidt; however, no official release dates have been announced.

Netflix is facing changes to its DVD business with two Time Warner, Inc. programmers: One change is that HBO will no longer sell DVDs to Netflix, instead forcing Netflix to buy DVDs at retail or drop them altogether; it seems Netflix will do the former.

Japan's Rakuten, Inc. has reported that Kobo, Inc., its recent acquisition, saw a ten-fold increase in its number of ebook customers over the holidays. Kobo has not released official sales numbers yet, but the company says it has had "hundreds of thousands" of new device activations each day since Dec. 24.

Apple filed three new patent applications that detail elements of Intel Corp. and Apple's joint technology for wired data transfer, Thunderbolt. It is speculated that the technology will be applied to iOS devices and would mean faster data transfer as well as faster recharging.

A new social platform, TouristLink.com, connects travelers with one another as well as new destinations and travel experts. The site is currently in beta and is expected to officially launch in May. TouristLink is a free service, and users can create an account on the site or through Facebook.

AOL struck a deal with publishing house Bonnier Corp.'s Parenting Group to sell premium ad inventory and promote content from Parenting.com. In turn, the parenting website will have access to some of AOL's ad tech and marketing services. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Advantage Business Media, LLC has purchased Vicon Publishing, Inc. Vicon Publishing will be renamed Vicon Business Media, Inc. and will operate as a subsidiary of Advantage. The acquisition expands Advantage's offering of publications concerning laboratory and forensics sciences.

Twenty-nine major news and information companies have signed on as initial investors and participants in NewsRight, an independent digital rights and content licensing organization led by former ABC News President David Westin. NewsRight aims to support original news reporting by facilitating the use of published news content and data analytics with the permission of publishers.

Barnes & Noble plans to "pursue strategic exploratory work to separate the Nook business" from the rest of the company, as reported on paidContent. In a statement, the company said, "There can be no assurance that the review of a potential separation of the NOOK digital business will result in a separation. There is no timetable for the review...."

According to court papers filed this week, Amazon has reportedly resolved its lawsuit with Smartphones Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corp., and the companies have asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. According to an article on paidContent, no terms of the settlement are mentioned in the court filings, nor do they offer further explanation as to why the companies have ended the lawsuit.

MetroPCS Wireless, Inc. has plans to release a Samsung smartphone later this year that will be able to tune in to live television broadcasts from local stations. This announcement makes MetroPCS the first cellphone company to offer such a feature.

RSuite CMS, from Really Strategies, Inc., has added a support community to its offering. The community is available exclusively for RSuite customers and partners. Discussions as well as support requests relative to the CMS software are now kept in one secure location.

NewspaperDirect.com overhauled its PressReader iPad app to add a number of updated features, including SmartFlow, which presents newspapers as a fluid stream of articles. SmartFlow is exclusive to PressReader 3.0; it blends the traditional way of reading with a new approach.

Alexander Street Press, LLC has released two new collections: Classical Scores Library: Volume II and Anthropology Online. Both resources are available immediately. Product trials and pricing information is available for qualified faculty and library staff.

TrafficLand has launched a direct sales program and increased its network of authorized dealers: Real-time traffic video content is now available directly through TrafficLand or through its authorized distributors: BeatTheTraffic, Radiate Media, and Total Traffic Network.

Springer's SpringerLink science platform is now available in a free mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch, which can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. The app contains articles from over 2,000 peer-reviewed journals and chapters from 49,000 books, totaling over 5.4 million documents.

Following the holidays, the app market hit an all-time high last week, with 1.2 billion apps downloaded between Dec. 25 and 31, according to Flurry Analytics & Estimates. This figure is based on the top 20 mobile countries that Flurry regularly tracks and includes downloads to both Android and iOS devices.

FaceItPages, from Go Smart Solutions LLC, released a new extensive reporting interface that offers more advanced tools aimed at creating a deeper understanding of the activity on professional Facebook pages. This interface is available to Agency and White Label members of FaceItPages.

Facebook added a note to the top of Facebook that asks, "Ever wonder how Facebook makes money?" and then invites users to click for more details. The link connects users to a new "About Advertising on Facebook" page, which lists the steps Facebook takes to deliver ads to pages. Facebook may be preparing its users for the Sponsored Stories ads entering news feeds in 2012.

News aggregator Digg is using Facebook's new Open Graph to instantly share the stories its users are reading in Digg over Facebook. Stories being read through Digg will appear on news feeds and as Timeline posts. Digg also launched a Newsbar that appears at the top of Digg pages reached through Facebook.

Scholastic Inc.'s Scholastic Media division launched its first Android apps in the form of I SPY games. The children's publishing, education, and media company debuted its "I SPY Arcade" game series based on the I SPY books. The games will be available for iPhone and iPod touch as well as for Android smartphones and tablets.

The United States International Trade Commission (ITC) announced it would grant a limited import ban on certain HTC devices, siding with Apple on its allegations of patent violations. The ban will go into place automatically after April 19, 2012. Though Apple accused HTC of violating four patents, the ITC asserted that only one was violated.

Google disabled its author search functionality from Google News in favor of the Google+ Authorship capabilities it introduced in November. Searching within Google News for "author:‘firstname lastname,'" returns no documents, but participating journalists can opt to have a link to their Google+ profiles displayed next to articles they've written.

Speech technology company Nuance Communications, Inc. is set to purchase Vlingo, Inc., a mobile voice software firm. Financial terms have not been disclosed. Nuance was previously suing Vlingo for patent infringement and planned to appeal a jury's ruling after Vlingo was found not guilty.

Calcalist, a Hebrew-language newspaper, has reported that Apple, Inc. closed on a deal for Anobit, a 200-employee Israeli company that makes flash memory technology. Although the final terms of the acquisition remain unknown, Calcalist places the deal in the $400 million to $500 million range.

The New York Times Co. is in the process of selling its Regional Media Group, responsible for 16 regional newspapers and other print publications and related businesses, to Halifax Media Group, of Daytona Beach, Fla. The group's average daily circulation is 433,251.

Netflix, Inc. and BBC have joined forces in order to offer BBC Worldwide programs, such as Doctor Who and Top Gear, to subscribers upon Netflix's U.K. launch early next year. Financial terms were not disclosed but the deal is non-exclusive.

Skyword, a content farm, secured $6 million in funding from Cox Media Group, Inc., a broadcasting, publishing, direct marketing, and digital media company. Cox is the sole investor in the company, and a Cox representative, not yet publicly named, will join Skyword's board of directors.

Condé Nast and Random House, Inc. have partnered to bring 75 Random House digital cookbooks to Condé Nast's cooking site, Epicurious. In the future, Epicurious reportedly plans to team up with other publishers to expand its offering. The digital cookbooks range in price from $10.99 to $24.99.

Yesterday, AT&T, Inc. renounced its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile USA, Inc., owned by Deutsche Telekom AG. AT&T will have to pay Deutsche Telekom $4 billion for breaking the deal off, but the companies also just announced a joint roaming agreement.

Ahead of the release of the Harry Potter ebooks and digital audiobooks, J. K. Rowling's Pottermore.com is running a survey on e-reading habits. Pottermore was originally scheduled to open shop in October, but due to concerns about heavy traffic, the launch was pushed back to sometime in the first half of 2012.

Social media and marketing agency Mr Youth, LLC found that social media users are more influential, spend more money on holiday gifts, and are more likely to recommend holiday gifts to others. The agency reports that 66% of social media users made a purchase directly resulting from an interaction with a brand or with friends and family via social media.

ebrary announced the results of its Download Survey for which it asked more than 1,000 participating librarians about mobile and offline access to ebooks. Patrons value the portability of ebooks, which led 92% of respondents to say that providing offline access to ebooks was at least as important as providing online access to them, if not more so.

CBS Local Digital Media announced a partnership with Examiner.com that will result in the delivery of original lifestyle content to local audiences, according to paidContent. The collaborative editorial pieces, which will focus on "Best Of" guides and "Top Spots" lists, will be written by local writers and published on CBS's locally targeted properties.

The Authors Guild filed a motion for class certification in its first step on a new path of litigation after the rejection of the proposed Google Books Settlement, according to paidContent. A procedural step in any class-action lawsuit, the class certification ensures the lawsuit is brought on the behalf of all U.S. authors whose copyrighted work Google has scanned.

While the Apple App Store was already available in Latin America, the iTunes Store, offering music and movie downloads, has launched in Brazil, according to paidContent. The store brings a catalog of over a thousand movies and 20 million songs by both local and international artists.

Nuxeo made numerous upgrades to its Nuxeo Platform, an open-source tool for building and running content-centric applications, to provide new social and mobile capabilities and improve developer experience. Version 5.5 offers enterprise content management applications, including document, digital asset, and case management.

Beginning in January 2012, Public Library Online, through a partnership with Google, will offer its members digital editions of books on "virtual bookshelves" accessible on library terminals and online. The two shelves available are The Arden Shakespeare and Our Environment.